[noisy_boy]

> You see practices cargo culted across the decades (like the 80 character terminal/line width and null-terminated strings, which can both be traced back to Hollerith punchcards from the late 19th century)

I limit my lines to 80 chars for more practical reasons. I have a wide-screen 43" monitor and restricting content to 80 columns allows me to have the project/navigation pane + 4 vertical splits side by side. Couple of those vertical splits can be split horizontally and I can see/edit, say, 6 open files at once without any switching of windows. Probably sounds like overkill but once you experience it, you know its worth it. Plus my eyes like less horizontal scanning too.

[jmull]

I'm not sure the author knows exactly what cargo cult means.

It seems like the perpetuation of the use of null-terminated strings is more about interoperability with what came before.

And like you suggest, 80 characters is at the limit of what people generally find comfortable reading. (I rely on editors to word-wrap code on-the-fly rather than insert line breaks manually... maybe that's what was meant? That's a tradeoff, though, since some tools don't do word-wrapping or don't do it well.)